Boys Against The Girls

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
08.17.08; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson: Matthew 15:10-28

With the arrival of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games this last week, I’ve watched far more sports than I can recall watching for years. Not only is the volume different, but it’s stuff that I can’t remember ever feeling motivated to watch in non-Olympic moments. How often do you gather your friends together with a big bowl of nachos and a fridge full of cold beverages to hoot and holler at synchronized diving? Or water polo? Or beach volleyball? When was the last time you tuned in to beach volleyball?

It seems like there are all manner of games that just aren’t run of the mill stuff. The Olympics is full of unusual events, yet even in the face of this broad assemblage of every game and sport-like event the world has yet known, it struck me this week that there was at least one missing.

It’s one of the oldest games in the book, one older than chess or Go or any of the classic board games. I can recall playing it as a kid out on the playground in elementary school with my fellow first graders. It’s also one of the simplest games around. Someone would yell, “Boys Against the Girls!” Then boys would chase girls around, or girls would chase boys around, or some combination of the two. You didn’t need to even worry about dividing up teams. That selection had already been made on a genetic level. You just ran around screaming and hollering.

When I was a kid, that game could also morph into all sorts of other games. It had soccer variants, and basketball variants. You just made sure that one team was all XY chromosomed kids, and another team was XX chromosomed kids. There was something about those games that always got kids fired up, as you shouted across the defining line of sex and talked gender smack, crowing about the basic stupidity of everyone on the other half of the human equation. And even though as a kid I knew that many girls were pretty cool and were also in significant ways far more entertaining to spend time around than my male brethren, I still enjoyed those games. They seemed so elemental. So basic. After all, it was just a game. It was just for fun.

The problem, as the children of the world grow up, is that after a while it stops being a game, and it gets to be much less fun. Should I give out a booyah big man smackdown shout that on average, women who work full-time in the United States make around 25% less than their male counterparts? Am I to be filled with the thrill of victory that comes with the knowledge that over two-thirds of the world’s illiterates are women, most of whom are kept that way because their cultures have decided that they’re not worth educating?

Boys rock. Woohoo.

That “game” becomes something very...unpleasant...when it becomes a way to keep essentially half of the human race eternally subordinated to the other. Unfortunately, in much of Christianity, the leaders...all men...take a few prooftexts from the later writings of Paul’s disciples and decide that all women are eternally and forever subordinate to men. No Christian woman is to give instruction to a Christian man. No Christian man is to take instruction or learn from a Christian woman. Oddly enough, the cultures that insist that that’s just exactly what Jesus wants are all cultures that traditionally place women in subordinate or submissive roles, no matter who they are or what gifts God has given them to contribute.

Very few of the Christian leaders from those cultures spend much time studying today’s passage from the Gospel of Matthew. It’s a strange passage about a woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.

First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not an Israelite. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the dogs.

But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her grace...backs down, and changes his mind. His resistance to her falls away, and she is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.

Now...if Jesus is willing to hear a woman out, and to learn from her faith...remind me again why a significant portion of the church that claims to follow Him is unwilling to do the same?